I have to say, for me Gallipoli
anniversary fatigue set in a while ago – perhaps some time during last year’s
Auckland Arts Festival – so it was with slight trepidation that I made my way
to Auckland Museum on Saturday evening. But Voices New Zealand promised an
intriguing mixture of new and old, popular song and choral repertoire, and from
the outset challenged the reverence we have come to expect from ANZAC events.

The show began with the lusty patriotism
of Keep the Home Fires Burning, which
in the stark marble Sanctuary space felt weirdly sacrilegious. Such snippets of
popular World War I songs were cleverly woven throughout the programme, from
the patriotic (Oh! It’s a Lovely War)
to the candid (When this lousy war is
over). These numbers provided a
tangible context for the rest of the programme, and gave individual choir
members a chance to demonstrate their solo chops – Morag Atchison and Lachlan
Craig were magnetic in Home Fires and
This Lousy War respectively.

Of the ‘classical’ offerings, both
Healey Willan’s How They So Softly Rest and
Eric Whitacre’s A Boy and a Girl were
vehicles to show off the choir’s harmonic versatility and exquisitely judged phrasing. A Boy
and a Girl has become a classic of the modern choral repertoire, with all
the Whitacre hallmarks – unresolved suspensions, juicy voicings, added-note
chords, rhythmic unison. A whole concert of this music would have become
cloying, but the programme was finely balanced: against Whitacre’s neo-Romantic
prettiness followed two contemporary New Zealand works that explored a more
cynical attitude towards war and its commemoration.

David Hamilton’s Suicide in the Trenches combined
militaristic elements – a solo muted trumpet playing the last post, and relentless
march rhythms mimicking a snare drum flam – with a sobering poem of Siegfried
Sassoon. The almost jaunty straightforwardness of the musical setting seemed
(deliberately?) at odds with the starkness of the text, but the point was made
nevertheless. Conversely, Jenny McLeod’s Dirge
for Doomsday employed a more complex, dissonant tonal language to match the
unvarnished truth of the words: “remember the fire and the burning bone.”
Written for the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, Dirge for Doomsday resolutely eschewed the glorification of war.

Although Voices New Zealand is
truly a well-oiled machine and the choral performances were uniformly
excellent, they were hamstrung by the rather
po-faced presentation of the whole event. This involved spoken monologues in
between numbers, and for me the over-enunciated, radio-play approach jarred
with the concert setting. I can appreciate that these small testimonies were a
way to interlace music of sometimes disparate style and tone, but they came
across as arch and awkward. One virtue of the spoken interludes was the clearly
intelligible text, not always present in the sung material, despite the best
efforts of the choir in a highly challenging acoustic. Even so, the Museum
Sanctuary lent the concert an air of ceremony, and served the singers well in
more voluminous moments.

At the centre of the programme
were two larger works by Finnish composer Jaakko Mäntyjärvi and New Zealand
composer Victoria Kelly. Both showcased the textural and tonal possibilities of
a capella choir to great effect, with Mäntyjärvi evoking the sea spray and
foghorns of a naval disaster in Canticum
Calamatis Maritimae. Pepe Becker’s crystalline soprano floated a wordless
lament over the top of the texture while Gregory Camp imbued a Latin chant with
groove and urgency. Despite textural complexities the piece had a satisfying
sense of direction, its rich chromatic lines winding around and between fixed
harmonic points.

Where Mäntyjärvi’s composition
employed text ritualistically, a heady combination of whispering, drones,
vocalise and chant, Kelly’s new commission The
Unusual Silence was grounded in concrete documentary artefacts. The
composer had pieced together a rich libretto from official orders and
propaganda, along with the personal reflections of soldiers killed during the
war. The interplay between these two elements gave the work a powerful sense of
tension, reinforced by Kelly’s apt characterisation of those twin voices of
authority and introspection. From the explosive opening lines, “please exhibit
in a conspicuous place” (referring to an enlistment poster) Kelly drew our
attention to the cadences and rhythms of a peculiarly formal style of language,
and the silences left between.

There’s a danger with the
remembrance of war that the music can get bogged down in solemnity, reverence
or universalist platitudes. But Kelly’s patient, sustained pacing through the
first two movements – the entire second movement built around a dogged pedal
note – led to a shattering climax in the third. After a stern warning from some
higher authority, “there is to be no cheering”, the pedal note – again
sustained through most of the third movement – was finally released as we met
the lush, apocalyptic vision of a lone soldier: “there was a glorious sunset”. The
full force of Voices New Zealand, combined with a squadron of male high school
students, made for a symphonic moment worthy of Sibelius or Elgar, a
well-earned emotional payoff.

After that searing moment of
clarity, the final movement felt like a great textural haze, depicting the
purgatorial swamp of unburied soldiers on the battlefield. There was
uncertainty here, uncharacteristically from the choir, but also a compositional
ambivalence, a resistance to easy solutions, a willingness to face up to mess. And
yet there was something hopeful too, a lone soprano voice, shaky but
determined, rising into the stratosphere. Although Kelly writes of her “sense
of inadequacy” in doing justice to the subject matter, the nuance and
sensitivity of her musical treatment, and especially her assured sense of form,
served to lift the work above mere memorialising.

Karen Grylls has long been a champion
of New Zealand music, and particularly those composers who are not considered
primarily “choral composers” – Ross Harris, Eve de Castro-Robinson, Leonie
Holmes. The commissioning of challenging new work is essential in a genre that
can at times feel safely, beautifully two-dimensional, and The Unusual Silence is a commission Grylls and Voices New Zealand
can be thoroughly proud of.

The concert ended with a tribute
to the late Peter Godfrey, who had died earlier in the week aged 95: a movement
from Jenny McLeod’s Childhood, There’s a
Time to Live. ‘Prof’ Godfrey was hugely influential in the New Zealand
choral community, and our wider music scene; the standard of our choirs today
can largely be attributed to the tireless work of luminaries like him and like
Karen Grylls. It’s remarkable that with so little public funding Voices New
Zealand continues to produce work at such a high level.